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Kafka’s tale of a man who wakes to find he has changed into a giant insect still has the power to shock and delight a century after it was first published. Many regard it as the greatest short story in all literary fiction 1. What need a modern reader know of FranzKafka’s Metamorphosis ( Die Verwandlung ) – arguably the most famous, also greatest, short story in the history of literary fiction...

Prague, mid-1880s. A young boy has been keeping his parents awake by repeatedly asking for water; exasperated, his father picks him up and carries him to the communal balcony (or Pawlatsche), where the child is left for a while, dressed only in his nightshirt.

The problem of our laws, wrote Kafka, is that they can involve arbitrary, secretive acts on the part of elites. The law, on this view, has “brought only slight, more or less accidental benefits, and done a great deal of serious harm, since it has given the people a false sense of security towards coming events, and left them helplessly exposed”. “We live”, Kafka concluded, “on the razor’s edge ...

One of the best things I can say about Irrational Man is that this murder mystery really isn't much of a mystery at all. Allen's economical script is built on a sober, through-line narrative. by George Prentice In the opening frames of Irrational Man, we see Joaquin Phoenix as a whiskey-soaked professor Abe Lucas—his flask is rarely out of reach—weaving his own id through FranzKafka's theories...

Forget about all the brassy, effects-laden blockbusters crowding the multiplexes this summer: For sheer entertainment value, none are likely to top this Argentine-Spanish anthology of comic shorts. Rich in black humor and satirical invective, “Wild Tales” became the most successful Argentinian movie of all time when it was released there last year (under the title […] The post ‘Wild Tales’ and ...

When 'unlimited' refers to a company's efforts to avoid liability AT&T has taken its four-year campaign to avoid liability for throttling its "unlimited" data plans to new heights by proposing that a $100m fine imposed last month be reduced to just $16,000.…

Mr Justice Peter Smith raised the matter of his own lost luggage 33 times in a British Airways competition case. If all judges did this, some companies would never get a fair hearing Picture the court room. You’re a high court judge sitting on a case worth billions of pounds and you have to step down from hearing the matter because you’ve lost your calm over some misplaced luggage . Not hundreds...